Home of the Compañero Manuel blog on zapatistas & mexico

Menu

Ayotzinapa and the inescapable remedy

Official documents of which La Jornada has a copy prove that the Attorney General of the Republic (PGR) withheld information related to organized crime’s use of passenger buses for drug trafficking, a key piece in the Ayotzinapa case. Said documents tell about the July 2014 arrest of Gonzalo Martín Souza Neves, El Uruguayo, and José Bahena Salgado, alleged members of the Guerreros Unidos criminal group, as well as about a bulletin issued the same day about the capture in which it was stated that Souza Neves was coordinating the shipment of drugs in hidden compartments on buses.

It’s important to emphasize that the “historic truth” that the PGR has maintained up to now, is based in good measure on the statements of the accused Gildardo López Astudillo, alias El Cabo Gil. According to the version the prosecution obtained and later impugned because of allegations of torture that the accused presented, it was only a rumor that the criminal organization used passenger buses for “moving” drugs, which is contradicted by the documents in the possession of this newspaper and by the statements of Monte Alejandro Rubido, head of the National Security Commission about it at the time.

With respect to the doctor and Basque psychologist Carlos Beristain, a former member of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI, the group’s initials in Spanish), he asserted in an interview with this newspaper that the PGR’s “sum of inabilities” in conducting the Ayotzinapa case, and in particular the hiding of the referenced information, merits an profound investigation, because they could indicate the existence of deceit on the part of the authorities.

Martín Beristain was one of the members of the group formed at the request of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to assist in the clarification of the events that occurred the night of September 26, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero, during which 43 teachers college students were disappeared, six people were murdered, and two students were gravely injured.

Based on his experience, he exposed that members of the GIEI never received the documents existing about the movement of heroin in passenger buses, despite the fact that they repeatedly requested them, and even summoned the PGR to request that data from the United States government.

Thus, the new evidence adds to the series of investigations that have consistently denied the version that members of organized crime murdered and incinerated 43 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College that night in the Cocula garbage dump. The sum of the evidence also recalls the absurd and inexplicable eagerness to maintain in its essential points that story throughout the terms of three different attorney generals: that of Jesús Murillo Karam, inventor of the official version, and those of his successors Arely Gómez González and Raúl Cervantes Andrade.

Nothing remains but to concede that Doctor Beristain is right when he asserts that if the lack of resolution of the multiple irregularities in the case persists, the disappearance of the los 43 students will become “a bloody wound” for Mexico.

The authorities must remedy more than two years of erratic irresponsible and even cruel behavior that has magnified the social repudiation and institutional discredit. A self-critical explanation of such incapacity and lack of will and, of course, the location of the disappeared and the full clarification of the circumstances of their disappearance are inescapable conditions for closing the wound and restoring even a minimum credibility to the bodies prosecuting justice and to all the government agencies.